


Five Times Rip Hunter Made A Cake (And One Time He Didn't)

by MyBloodyUnicorn



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2018-11-02 09:01:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10941246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyBloodyUnicorn/pseuds/MyBloodyUnicorn





	1. Chapter 1

“Gideon,” Rip said one morning. “I think I’d like to make a cake.”

For more than eight months, he’d been alone on the Waverider. Each morning, he made note of the day. _Two hundred and fifty-one days… two hundred fifty-two… two hundred fifty-three…_ He’d gotten himself stranded before but then he’d had hope of rescue. This time though, probably not.

One moment, they were together, fleeing from a battlefield in twentieth-century France, but then seemingly a moment later, he found himself waking up on the ship’s floor, without knowing how he’d gotten there. He sprang to his feet and began calling out to his crew, needing to know if they were all safe. _Dr. Palmer? Professor Stein? Ms. Lance… Sara?_ And then the realization of what had happened crashed down upon him: the Legion had the Spear of Destiny, and with it, the power to rewrite reality itself. 

And now, months later, here he was. He could feel himself starting to give in to despair, depression wrapping around his ankles like tendrils, threatening to pull him down and immobilize him. He needed something — anything — to snap him out of it. There was one thing that had always cheered him, no matter how badly things were going. Cake. _You’re never too old for cake,_ his mother once told him during a particularly surly teenaged day. He refused to admit it then but he knew she was right.

He stood before the the galley synthesizer and opened a new file to program in a cake. He scrolled through seemingly endless screens of ingredients but nothing seemed to be quite what he wanted. And then it struck him: dark beer, something bittersweet with notes of coffee. _And chocolate_ , he thought, _but not as frosting._ He tapped in the final touches on the recipe — pieces of dark chocolate in the batter, baked in a traditional bundt shape — and then watched as materialized before his eyes.He cut a piece of the cake and sat down to eat it. The cake was malty and rich, like a heady draught of Guinness. 

_Mick Rory would love this,_ he thought and then froze, his fork still in midair. He looked at the cake and realized… he hadn’t just made a _cake Mick Rory would like;_ he’d actually made _a Mick Rory cake_. It was not very sweet. It probably wasn’t to everyone's liking. And it was full of beer.It even resembled him a bit, Rip thought, it’s got a certain coarseness to the crumb. 

After looking at it for a moment, he set the fork down, pushed his plate aside and went back to the synth — he had another idea. This time, he programmed in a pound cake, heavy and golden and buttery rich, but cut with the sharp acidity of lemon. 

_Leonard Snart,_ he thought. 

When the cake materialized, he set the new cake on the table. He carefully cut a slice, then picked it up and took a bite. 

“Ha!” he said to the empty room. “Perfect.” 

Gideon awoke and asked what, exactly, was perfect but Rip felt foolish explaining _I’ve captured the essence of Leonard Smart in cake form_ and instead told her it was nothing. 

He sat at the galley table again and pushed the two cakes next to each other. He placed the piece of lemon cake in his hand on the same plate as the stout cake and began to eat them both, a bite of one and then the other. He thought the flavors of each would clash but somehow they worked together: chocolate and lemon, tart and bitter and sweet. 

For an instant, he felt almost as if they were there with him, arguing, plotting something nefarious. But he knew they were both gone—and far more gone than the others. One of them died saving everyone and yet somehow came back even worse than ever, while the other one betrayed them all. _Again_. The cake turned to ash in his mouth. 

_I must be going mad,_ he thought. 

He picked up the two plates, dumped the cakes into the recycler, and put himself to bed. 


	2. Chapter 2

One evening, he dropped into a galley chair, feeling exhausted and defeated. He had repaired and rerouted anything he could think of, hoping to get the Waverider’s reserve power back online and he’d been at it for… days? 

_Or weeks?_ he wondered. 

He knew he was beginning to lose sense of how long he’d been alone. Gideon would know exactly how long it had been, but he feared asking her would trigger her clinical assessment algorithm: _how are you feeling today, Captain Hunter, on a scale of one to ten?_ She had pulled him out of a dark time after Miranda and Jonas died but things weren’t as bad as that. Not yet. 

“Coffee,” he said to himself. “That’s all I need.” 

The synth prompts led him through the menu screens and down into an array of unfamiliar coffee options: caffe breve, Americano, cold brew. And at the bottom of the list, a drink called _The Flash._

_Ah, yes,_ he thought. _Kendra._

In her first days on board, Kendra had scoffed at the coffee drinks in the ship’s menu. 

_Coffee and… decaf coffee,_ she said. _Very original._

He showed her how to create recipes and she began programming in new coffee drinks. 

_I’m a barista,_ she would say before quickly correcting herself. _I…_ was _a barista._

At the time, he wondered if she did this every time she lived again. Did she always struggle to hold onto two versions of herself at the same time? Or did she cast her old self aside once she regained the memories of those other lives?

After scrolling up and down through Kendra’s creations, he chose something called a flat white. The coffee materialized before him, with a heart drawn into the foam that topped it, and he smiled. Kendra always was smarter than she let on. 

He took a sip of the coffee—smooth and milky sweet—and realized he was famished. Cake seemed the obvious choice for coffee but the last ones he made soured his mood for days after.He stood at the food synthesizer, coffee in hand, flipping through menu options, until at last he decided he would make another cake after all. 

He began to program something that he remembered having in the American South, in the late 20th century. He couldn’t remember the cake’s name, but it had a little of everything—bits of pineapple and banana, pecans, cinnamon and vanilla—and all its disparate elements came together seamlessly. 

As the cake began to materialize, he asked Gideon to help him identify this recipe. 

“It appears to be a hummingbird cake,” she said.

Rip could almost hear Kendra laugh and say, _I am so_ not _a hummingbird._

As he sat in the galley, he wondered where she was now, whether she had been spared whatever the Legion had done to the rest of his crew. Was she still Hawkgirl or was she a barista again? 

_Or does she even still exist in this reality?_ he asked himself. 

He sat alone with his cake and coffee, questioning whether he would ever see her—or anyone else—ever again. 


	3. Chapter 3

Rip stood before the ship’s power manifold.

“If I can’t restore power, perhaps I can just… reroute what’s there,” he muttered to himself. The panel slid open, exposing a snarl of wires and cables, and his heart sank. He knew how to keep the Waverider running, how to repair it in even the most dire circumstances, but altering its essential systems cofounded him. 

_I wish Doctor Palmer was here,_ he thought again.

Rip recruited Raymond for his technological genius. The Atom suit alone was years ahead of its time and Rip could only imagine what Ray could do with all the technology of the future at his disposal. He’d worked with geniuses before and they’d all been sort of the same: a bit self-absorbed, haughty, often difficult to work. But not Ray Palmer. 

After one of their early failures to capture Vandal Savage, Rip had retreated to his study. He wanted nothing more than to sink into a bottle of rum but Ray appeared at his door.

“I, uh, would have knocked but…” Ray gestured to the open doorframe around him. “I thought you could use some company.”

Rip took out a second glass and poured one for Ray. They sat in silence for a moment and then Ray began to describe the night his fiancée Anna was murdered. At first, Rip just nodded and waited for Ray to stop talking. But as Ray continued, Rip noticed there was no bitterness or cynicism in Ray’s voice. He spoke of the anger and helplessness he felt, but without hatred. When he created the Atom suit, he didn’t create it for revenge, he created it for justice, to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. 

At that moment, Rip recognized Ray was more than some tech genius he’d recruited: he was a good man. There was a sort of wholehearted goodness to him—and on another man, it might have come across as corny or even delusional. But Ray was kind and self-deprecating and unabashedly enthusiastic about visiting the past. 

And on top of all that, he was a technological mastermind… which Rip desperately needed here and now. 

He sat on the ship’s floor, staring into the power manifold compartment, willing a solution to appear. He couldn’t even ask himself _what would Raymond do?_ because he knew that’s what true genius is, finding the solution no one else sees. Without Ray, trying to reroute power was hopeless. Rip left the panel open and left in search of a drink.

In his study, after his third whiskey, he thought of Ray and wondered, _what sort of cake would Raymond be?_

Immediately, he knew the answer.  _Coconut_. 

He got to his feet and began making his way to the galley to make a cake. 

For a man who flew about in a suit powered by a dwarf star, there was always something a little old-fashioned about Ray, Rip thought. And with a genuine sweetness that wasn’t cloying or false.

_Definitely coconut,_ he thought.

Rip stood at the ship’s galley synth again, squinting through the whiskey in his system, tapping in the ingredients for a coconut cake. He was nearly done when he scrolled back and made it a _gluten-free_ coconut cake—with just a hint of lime. Then, at the last moment before it began to materialize, he scaled the recipe down, to one-sixteenth of its original size. What emerged wasn’t exactly a cupcake; it was a miniature cake. 

_Atom-sized, if you will,_ he thought and smiled for the first time in what felt like a very long time. 


	4. Chapter 4

Rip awoke late, no longer sure of the time or even the day. The night before, he confessed to Gideon that he had no more ideas. None. He tried everything and he could not come up with a solution. He was stuck here—wherever _here_ was—with no crew, no friends, no family. The Legion could rewrite all of existence on a whim while he would live out the rest of his natural life in this ship with only Gideon for companionship. 

_Perhaps you could take up a hobby,_ she suggested. 

Last night he’d scoffed, but now he saw this day and the next day and the next stretching out before him with nothing to fill them. 

_Maybe I do need a hobby,_ he thought. 

Still in his dressing gown, he shuffled down the hall into his study. 

_Well_ , he thought. _The captain’s study now._

As he looked around, he noted almost everything was as he’d left it, but Sara had moved the desk slightly. Sitting there now gave him a better view of the Waverider’s front windows. He shook his head, wondering how he had been on board for all these years and never tried this. She was always brilliant, he thought. He could almost still picture her here in this very room, welcoming him back, telling him he belonged here. 

Still thinking of Sara, he asked Gideon to play him something mid- to late-20th century. Their first mission had been to this period, he thought. 

_God, what a disaster that was._

Everything had gone wrong. He’d harbored doubts about each member he’d recruited and when their inaugural mission went pear-shaped, he saw his worst fears confirmed. He remembered how he’d even had to violate timeline protocols to ensure Martin Stein’s wife remained in the picture.

Rip may have had misgivings about the nearly all of the crew, but he’d have done anything to keep Professor Stein on board. Stein had multiple PhDs and quite literally wrote the book on alpha particles—Rip needed expertise like that. The fact that Stein was also Firestorm was more of an inconvenience than an asset, Rip felt. Jax, as almost everyone seemed to insist on calling him, was too young and too inexperienced to be on board. But Rip simply couldn’t have one without the other: taking Stein without Jax would be cataclysmic. If Stein was to be on board, then Jax came along as well.

Once on board, Rip knew Jax needed something to do. Everyone else was setting their unique skills to work, so Rip asked Jax if he could manage some repairs to the Waverider. The younger man scoffed, saying he was _a car mechanic, not a timeship mechanic_ , but he set to work anyway. Despite never seeing anything like it before, Jax had an innate grasp of how the ship functioned, understanding far more than Rip could have expected from someone of his era. 

In hardly any time at all, he taught Jax everything there was to know about the Waverider: its quirks, its moods, its scars. Soon, Jax could sense even when something wasn’t _quite_ right, just by the way the hum of engines altered subtly. 

Rip always knew there would come a day where he could no longer pilot the ship. When his son Jonas was a baby, he used to carry him around the ship, telling him that one day all this would be his. After Jonas was gone, Rip had wondered who would take care of the Waverider after he was gone but with Jax around, Rip knew the ship he loved so much would pass into capable hands.

But now that was taken from him as well. He left the captain’s study, heading for the galley, not knowing where else to go. He was alone on this ship and would remain here unless someone found him. The Waverider’s medical programs could keep him alive almost indefinitely and resource stores were laid in for a crew of eight, more than enough for one person to live on for… decades. The hall seemed to warp and twist under his feet. He could feel a claustrophobic panic squeezing in, tightening around his chest and throat. 

He closed his eyes and placed a hand on the ship to steady himself, the scarcely perceptible vibration of the engines buzzing under his hand. 

_Rip, it’s okay._

He could still hear Sara in his head, the way she assured him everything would be fine when found him locked up inside his own mind.

_It’s okay,_ she told him. _You’re home._

When he opened his eyes again, he knew Gideon was right. He needed a hobby. He needed something to do to keep himself occupied or he would succumb to terror and despair. Making cakes was as good as anything else he could think of, and he strode purposefully to the galley.

Once there, he recalled how he’d often found both halves of Firestorm eating ice cream: Mr. Jackson eating with enthusiasm, Professor Stein with an air of reluctance. 

_If Jefferson wants ice cream,_ Martin said, _it means_ I _also want ice cream… although I don’t_ really _want it._

In an instant, Rip knew what sort of cake he should make to honor the memory of those two. He went to the galley computer and programmed in a circular pound cake, covered with a dome of ice cream underneath a froth of Swiss merengue. Cake and ice cream, two separate entities, combined into one. When it emerged from the synth, he found the bottle of 19th-century rum Mr. Rory had hidden away in a drawer. He ladled the rum over the cake and set it ablaze, an eerie blue flame in the dim galley. 

He could almost hear Martin Stein’s professorial tone: _baked Alaska en flambé! You see, Jefferson, the egg white meringue serves as an insulator to the ice cream underneath, keeping it from melting…_

But Jax would surely cut him off with a sharp _c’mon, Gray, let’s eat!_ and nothing more would be said. 

He watched the flame burns out and wondered where either half of Firestorm was now.


	5. Chapter 5

Days bled into weeks and then months. He’d started out well enough. After calisthenics every morning, he dove into the classics he’d always swore he’d get around to reading. Every evening, he made himself a proper dinner, watched a film, and then had a nightcap before bed.

But after a few weeks, one nightcap became two… and then more. Reading became harder and harder to focus on. His eyes would slide off the page until he was looking around at the captain’s study and thinking about how empty it was.

_I wish she was here,_ he thought. 

The idea arose more often than he cared to admit. Yes, he missed his crew, some more than others, but none so much as Sara Lance. 

When she’d pulled him from the prison his mind was in, he’d found it hard to put the pieces all the people he’d been back together again. He remembered it all, somehow, all the versions of himself. And in all those iterations, she was there, in some way. 

When he was Phil, as he was slaving over his final film project, he _knew_ her, somehow. As he wrote the screenplay, he knew her so well he thought he could almost see her in his mind: her ferocity, her tenderness, even the spattering of freckles across her skin. He auditioned every woman on campus, trying to find someone who embodied her and never came close. She wasn’t real, he thought, she couldn’t be real—until suddenly she _was_. For an instant, his heart flooded with relief and joy until just as quickly, alarm bells rang in his head. 

_She’s not real,_ he thought. _I made her up, she’s fictional, I’m losing my mind!_

And then the Legion came and stole him away again. In the fleeting respites between torture, he thought of her. Was she real? She seemed real. And more than that, she seemed to… _care_ about him. But how? Did she know him after all?

Just as he thought he was close to knowing the truth, the Legion broke him. They restored his memories and stole his humanity, locking his true self away. They sent him out into the world to kill and by God, he went gladly. The Legion had taken some of his emotions yet not all—he was still quite capable of spite, rage, contempt. And the worst part was that he remembered it all. 

Gideon did her best to repair the damage, trying overwrite the trauma of what he’d lived through. Even now, alone on the ship, he sometimes woke in a cold sweat at night. The nightmare was always the same: his hands on Sara’s throat, her pulse beating under his fingers but fading away and he couldn’t stop, not until he awoke with his hands twisting the sweat-soaked sheets. 

_It wasn’t you,_ she told him, _this is you._

He tried to hold on to that every time the nightmares came back. 

_This is you,_ she said. _This is you._

He told her he was sorry but the words sounds so small and meaningless compared to what he’d done. She didn’t treat him any differently. If anything, she was kinder to him than ever before. 

_I know what it’s like to lose yourself,_ she said. _When I came back from the pit…_

She paused, as if steeling herself for what she was about to say. But then Mr. Rory had blundered in, demanding the synth make him something and the moment was gone. 

And now here he was again in the galley alone, possibly alone forever, making foolish cakes to cheer himself and make him feel a little alone. He wondered if he even could he make a cake that reminded him of Sara Lance. 

How would he possibly capture the way she sprang into motion when threatened or how she smiled when she learned to pilot the ship? She was so deadly, so ferocious, how could she also be as kind and open and loving as she was? She’d stood over him and could have killed him— _should_ have killed him. But she didn’t. She saved him from death. And then she saved him from himself. 

_How am I going to live without her?_ he asked himself. 

The question shocked him. 

He had been alone before this. He’d lost people—so many people—before this, too. But now he couldn’t bear to think of a life without all of them. 

Without _her_. 

She might be out there somewhere right now and he'd never know. He might never see her again, never hear her voice, never…

“Oh my God,” he said softly. “I’m in love with Sara Lance.”

He stood there, alone on the Waverider, joy and despair crashing inside him. How had he not seen it until now, he wondered. And how could he possibly live with this knowledge now?

He ordered rum from the synth and took a swig directly from the bottle. He would need something, anything, just to keep from going mad. He drank until he staggered to bed and when he woke, he picked up where he left off. 

Never leaving his drunken haze, he had the synth produce cake after cake, from towering tiered cakes to petit fours. He threw himself into creating, perfecting recipes for pies, biscuits, tarts. 

When he demanded Gideon produce more rum for him, she refused. 

“I’ve got no way of getting the reserve power back online,” he snapped. “And I've got no way of sending out any signal of any sort, which means that I am destined to live out the rest of my days right here with you.” He struggled to control his rage, knowing even if she were alive, he was helpless. He would never see Sara again.

Gideon placidly stated she’d been working on new algorithms to redirect power. Once power was fully back online, she could boost his distress signal.

“I don't know if I can do this, Gideon.” 

He didn’t dare to dream for so long and now the thought of finding Sara again terrified him. His stomach churned with anxiety and liquor. But now, there was hope. 

“First, I'm going to vomit, and second…” he said. “Let's do this.”


End file.
